History memes #33

[09.01.2024: tuesday]

8/100 days of productivity

i studied until 11pm yesterday, stayed up a lot later and am now surviving on coffee alone. sadly, i couldn't get my reading done but i made up for it by going over my biology study notes and adding onto them where it was needed. studying at my school this morning because there's an organizational event.

goals for today:

- finalise biology notes (✓)

- revise neurobiology (✓) + population ecology + ecosystems

- revise cold war after 1955

- go over bismarck + ww2 with family

(- do a practice exam for history) <--- only if i still find time

- don't mess up my sleep schedule further

lots of things to do, so little time to do them. but i can do this! - if i just keep saying that to myself, maybe i'll start believing it lmao.

wishing a productive day to all!

left: from this morning. right: my set-up for the next two weeks' study lockdown.

16.03.23

Studying history at the local library

🎧: Tempi migliori - Viito

People who claim to research WW2 when someone says the people involved were their own individuals and not inherently bad people just for being from a certain country 😱😱😱.

(Someone got mad at me for telling them to watch Ordinary Men after they got mad at me for posting pictures of French girls who dated German’s). (On my side blog dedicated to historical photos no less).

(#3)

What am I studying today?

history

a concerning amount of witchblr will be like "um actually new years was stolen by europeans from the ancient god scroobus mcdoobus" and then you actually try to research scroobus mcdoobus and it turns out he was invented in the 1940s by a conspiracy theorist who powdered every meal with ketamine and thinks that queer people are reincarnated fish

i love studying. i love writing. i love reading. i love learning languages. i love doing mathematics. i love wandering over some particular sum and trying to come up with formulas to solve it. i love physics. i love biology. i love chemistry. i love history. i love literature. i love learning.

not to achieve the perfect grades ever. but it just amazes me that there's so much to know and learn and write and read about in the universe. my curiosity wouldn't get enough of it.

going through my old journals as part of therapy homework and i'm reading a section written in the emotional wreckage of a full-on breakdown when i get hit with this line:

There is never a satisfying answer to ‘Why didn’t they love me?’

like wow babe. good fucking point

medieval parchment repairs

in a psalter, south-western germany, late 12th/early 13th c.

source: Hermetschwil, Benediktinerinnenkloster, Cod. membr. 37, fol. 19r, 53r, and 110r

quotes by Victorians about the 1920s view of their generation's women

"We are frequently told that the Victorian woman...generally behaved like a pampered and neurotic infant. This is all moonshine. I do not think that I ever saw a woman faint before I came to London in 1869, and not often after then...they enjoyed a hearty laugh, and a good many of them a contest of wits with any man." -Nineteenth Century, a Monthly Review, 1927 (written by a man born in 1850)

"What queer ideas the girl of 1929 has about the Victorian period- they are not a bit true...Marriage was by no means the end and aim of our existence. Oxford and Cambridge claimed quite a few of us after school days were over. We had great ideas about 'life' and what it all might mean to us." -St. Petersburg Times, 1929 (written by a woman born in 1853)

"True, debutantes were chaperoned at balls. But that fact did not prevent them from dancing as frequently as they chose with their favorite partners. The idea that girls in the Victorian era spent their days sewing seams and practicing scales is another fallacy." -Gettysburg Times, July 1, 1927 (quote from the Dowager Lady Raglan, Ethel Jemima Somerset, who lived from 1857 to 1940)

that Steven Universe meme

Ask an older generation of white South Africans when they first felt the bite of anti-apartheid sanctions, and some point to the moment in 1968 when their prime minister, BJ Vorster, banned a tour by the England cricket team because it included a mixed-race player, Basil D’Oliveira. After that, South Africa was excluded from international cricket until Nelson Mandela walked free from prison 22 years later. The D’Oliveira affair, as it became known, proved a watershed in drumming up popular support for the sporting boycott that eventually saw the country excluded from most international competition including rugby, the great passion of the white Afrikaners who were the base of the ruling Nationalist party and who bitterly resented being cast out. For others, the moment of reckoning came years later, in 1985 when foreign banks called in South Africa’s loans. It was a clear sign that the country’s economy was going to pay an ever higher price for apartheid. Neither of those events was decisive in bringing down South Africa’s regime. Far more credit lies with the black schoolchildren who took to the streets of Soweto in 1976 and kicked off years of unrest and civil disobedience that made the country increasingly ungovernable until changing global politics, and the collapse of communism, played its part. But the rise of the popular anti-apartheid boycott over nearly 30 years made its mark on South Africans who were increasingly confronted by a repudiation of their system. Ordinary Europeans pressured supermarkets to stop selling South African products. British students forced Barclays Bank to pull out of the apartheid state. The refusal of a Dublin shop worker to ring up a Cape grapefruit led to a strike and then a total ban on South African imports by the Irish government. By the mid-1980s, one in four Britons said they were boycotting South African goods – a testament to the reach of the anti-apartheid campaign. . . . The musicians union blocked South African artists from playing on the BBC, and the cultural boycott saw most performers refusing to play in the apartheid state, although some, including Elton John and Queen, infamously put on concerts at Sun City in the Bophuthatswana homeland. The US didn’t have the same sporting or cultural ties, and imported far fewer South African products, but the mobilisation against apartheid in universities, churches and through local coalitions in the 1980s was instrumental in forcing the hand of American politicians and big business in favour of financial sanctions and divestment. By the time President FW de Klerk was ready to release Mandela and negotiate an end to apartheid, a big selling point for part of the white population was an end to boycotts and isolation. Twenty-seven years after the end of white rule, some see the boycott campaign against South Africa as a guide to mobilising popular support against what is increasingly condemned as Israel’s own brand of apartheid.

. . . continues at the guardian (21 May, 2021)

paintings of me trying to get out of bed in the morning

‘Winter Night in the Mountains. Study’ by Harald Sohlberg, c. 1901-1902.

so bad news everybody I do not have pictures of the horrible projections of the microfilm readers in the Brussels National Library in the year of our common era 2015 anymore which is entirely a good thing because they were horrible they would retraumatize me and tbh the dire conditions of Belgian archives is one of the main reasons I would never want to pursue a PhD in history (although we're 8 years on so I'll assume they got better but also probably not), but I came across these two docs:

which don't seem to belong in a folder of study materials for historians-to-be but we watched/studied Cat on a hot tin roof for our History of the Body, Gender and Sexuality class (great movie for masculinity studies apparently, have literally no other memories of it) and we had to do a group presentations for a class 'Drugs in World History' about stimulants like cocaine and depressants like opium and their role in global commodity chains during colonization and those are still the two classes that I think about regularly when discussing current events and I think it's absolutely WILD that they did more for my understanding of history than, say, 'political history of the early modern period' or some generic shit like that.